NGC 5956

NGC 5956 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 89 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 38,000 ly, about 38% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 89 million years ago.

Because its light is 89 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5956 as it looked roughly 89 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).